Agile Hour: Teaching XP Skills to Students and IT Professionals

Agile Methods, like Extreme Programming, have increasingly become a viable alternative for conducting software projects, especially for projects with a very short time-to-market or uncertain customer-requirements. Using a technique called Agile Hours it is possible to convey many feelings associated with an Extreme Programming project. Within 70 minutes, a project is performed in which a product is built with Lego bricks. We applied this approach to (1) students and (2) IT professionals. By comparing the two groups, we found that both behaved comparable: we observed a number of interesting differences, although of minor importance. Both groups seemed to benefit from the Agile (Lego) Hours.